FIBPlus had some visible rough edges (in the docs
and dialog design) and you know what they say about
first impressions. IBO feels quite mature but I don't
like its complexity. The dbExpress IB drivers from
Borland carries the implicit threat of incompatibility
while Upscene's Firebird dbx driver is still in Beta and
while freely downloadable is annoyingly time-limited so
it discouraged me from trying it out.

Since ADO is one of the, if not the most, widely accepted
standard in the Win32 world and seems like a lightweight
layer (ala dbExpress but more sophisticated) I'm thinking
it can't hurt to access Firebird via it. Even Delphi and
Python will talk to ADO (I just don't know how mature the dbGo
components are). ADO might even prove to be one of the best
ways to talk to Firebird... will the ADO model support the
different FB/IB transaction models or otherwise be able to
expose its more sophisticated features?

At least four companies provide OLE-DB providers for FB/IB
and there are at least 2 free ones! See
http://ibp.lcpi.lipetsk.ru/eng/links.html Anyone have good
or bad experiences to report with them?

The couple I tried (ZStyleGRoup's and SIBProvider)
seem to be OK at least on the surface...